Adobe Creative Suite Going Saas, No More Perpetual Licensing

Professional designers and creative types alike will no longer have to purchase Adobe Creative Suite licenses or disks because the entire ecosystem is being absorbed into the Creative Cloud.

Adobe is renaming Creative Suite to Creative Cloud.

Photoshop, InDesign + Illustrator in the Cloud

In 2012, Adobe launched Creative Cloud, a US $50 per month cloud version of its Creative Suite offering the most popular design tools as an online option. Adobe will begin offering these titles as Creative Cloud only options starting June 17, the company announced at its Max conference this week.

Companies will not have to buy licenses or disks, and instead can rely on the online version for all their Adobe tool needs. It's a big move for Adobe, and one that could set the bar for how widely distributed software systems are deployed. Creative Suite is now Creative Cloud, and the whole number versioning of new updates will also disappear, the company announced.

That means no more separate versions of Photoshop in Creative Cloud and Creative Suite, for example. All product development will be for the cloud model only going forward.

Share Settings, Get Real time Feedback

Adobe also announced several updates to the Creative Cloud, and one of them is the ability to share setting across devices. Assets, styles, colors and fonts will be synced between desktops and mobile devices, and all projects will be sharable via a service called Behance Adobe acquired recently.

Behance is an online portfolio, and creative projects can be shared there for instant feedback and mentoring. The seamless sharing will allow for a more social feel to Creative Cloud work because Behance produces a stream of updates from the connected community.

Because so many of Adobe's customers are still using licenses or store bought versions, the company is offering US $30 per month Creative Cloud subscriptions to anyone currently on CS3 or higher. Furthermore, those using Creative Suite 6 will still have their versions supported in the next versions of OS X and Windows, but there won't be any new features updated.

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